Iraq: The Outlaw State
The man with the beard was a teacher who went to the police one day to report on a neighbor who was trading in antiquities stolen from the National Museum. The police thanked him for his cooperation. The teacher, his conscience relieved, went back to his school. The police submitted a report to the Ministry of Defense that the teacher’s house was an al Qaeda hideout. The police were in partnership with the antiquities smuggler. The Ministry of Defense sent the report to the US Army, who bombed the teacher’s house by helicopter. His wife, his four children, and his elderly mother were killed. The teacher escaped with his life, but he suffered brain damage and lost his arms.
In another country such a story might be thought fantastical. In Iraq it could well be true; fiction here seems merely to be more concise than fact.
.. Excepting perhaps the Russians from 1914 to 1953, few modern nations have been so cursed by ill luck for such an extended period.
.. Corruption has naturally flourished in such conditions, but so have other ills. While Maliki, in a fashion reminiscent of Saddam Hussein, rewarded loyal Shia tribal chiefs with gold-plated revolvers, foes of the prime minister found their followers cut out of government jobs and contracts in a country where the state employs 60 percent of the formal workforce.
.. For all Maliki’s incompetence as an administrator or as a military leader—the initial collapse of Iraq’s costly and overmanned military in the face of the SIC being all the proof needed—he proved masterful at the art of divide-and-rule.